Friends—
With our second novel Galahad’s Fool coming out in June, we’ve just updated the e-book price for our first,Realists, to FREE! for the next three months (Mar-Apr-May). We’d love you to read it. It’s for any e-book platform or your computer screen (see below). And please pass the offer along to your friends.
Realists was published five years ago but given very little promo. Sad to say, it’s more timely than ever: America flying apart at the seams, hiving off separate realities. But it’s really about our characters—our readers seem to love them, as do we.
Realists is comic dystopian optimism in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut. The War on Drugs has morphed into a War on Dreams (escapist! pornographic! traumatic to children!), with mandatory suppressant dosages plunging America into mass psychosis. As a third of America goes clinically insane, hot-tempered Eddie sparks up an edgy romance with Pepper, a tough single mom from Oklahoma. His complaint about a phone bill targets the duo as terrorists, and a motley group of losers, loners, and seekers become entangled in their fate. With the small clutch of innocents, they're trapped by the Feds in an elevator, and as they plunge to their deaths, a stroke of lunatic physics plops them onto a ramshackle, cross-country Green Tortoise bus.
It's a cliff-hanger odyssey as America splinters to bits: an elderly couple morph into Bonnie & Clyde; Chicago disappears; ghost buffalo trample a helicopter assault; a desert shaman evokes an erotic night of undreamt dreams; and the rickety bus crawls toward a deadly face-off on the Oakland Bay Bridge. On the journey, couples split and bond, small children find magic, space aliens watch it all on TV, and the passengers bond into a tribe of beautiful survivors.
Yes, fantasy, but sometimes fantasy keeps us sane. You can download Realists in any format at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/272051. We’d love to have your response. And if you can’t stand digital media, the wood-pulp version is at www.DamnedFool.com.
Conrad Bishop & Elizabeth Fuller
—Some Reader Reviews—
Anyone who loves Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, Phillip K. Dick, Phillip José Farmer and other masters of satirical, dystopian-yet-humanistic, hilarious and sexy sci-fi will find considerable delight in this rip-roaring, picaresque yarn from Conrad Bishop and Elizabeth Fuller. . . . a momentum that never flags . . . "Realists" reminded me of how much pure fun reading can be.
Often funny and frighteningly acute, delivered in muscular language. . . . Reading REALISTS is like staying up into the wee hours, surrounded by the spoils of a wild party, drinking booze from many tumblers and listening to some very clever, insightful, and verbally gifted people extemporize together.
Each thread of this strange dystopian tapestry is worth tugging on and following. The quirky characters are also kinda endearing, not just ornaments to hang the plot on. But it's the pungency of the social satire that really got me. Amazon's clicky-choose-one-review-boxes apparently don't believe that something can be both "Dark" and "Hopeful" -- I chose "dark" - but really, it is both.
I thoroughly enjoyed this near-future dystopian romp. There are lots of sociological, political, and psychological jokes and snappy one liners. Sound guy Eddy and single mom Pepper manage a witty, hip, and satisfying courtship against a backdrop of nutty characters and an America gone insane. It's the kind of comic Armageddon I like.
The authors are correct when they say it is in the Vonnegut vein--it's smart, funny, and skewers modern culture with the same deftness that Kurt demonstrated. Worth reading for just the pithy one-liners that pepper the text, but holds together as a satisfying satiric yarn all the way through.
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